


Young, and in Fields

by verdenal



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: 5 Times, Female Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, M/M, Napping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-28
Updated: 2017-01-28
Packaged: 2018-09-20 08:34:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9482993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/verdenal/pseuds/verdenal
Summary: Or: 5 times someone caught Shiro napping on Keith, and one time no one saw Keith sleeping on Shiro. [pre-s2]





	

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Молодые и беспечные](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10499892) by [Perfect_criminal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Perfect_criminal/pseuds/Perfect_criminal)



**i.**

None of them can sleep after a fight, and none of them really wants to be alone, either. Instead, they huddle in the lounge and play cards until the adrenaline wears off. Normally it’s Pidge—maybe an age thing—or Keith—presumably because his only two settings seem to be 0 and 11—who drops off first, but today they’re both alert and focused on the game. Hunk hopes they lose steam soon, because can feel his eyelids starting to droop, but he doesn’t want to go to bed. He doesn’t like the idea of leaving his friends alone, or being alone, even now, after what must be an Earth hour has passed. He looks to Lance, but Lance is somehow both wide awake and losing Go Fish. And Shiro, of course—

Shiro, Hunk realizes, hasn’t said anything in ages. His head is bent down towards his chest and his eyes aren’t open.

“Is he asleep?” Hunk whispers.

Keith turns to look, and nods, then shrugs when Hunk asks if they should do something about it.

“Let him sleep,” Keith says. “It’s what we do with everyone else.”

Shiro sleeping is weird, because sometimes Shiro seems less like a person and more like the personified ideal of the heroic pilot, but Hunk does his best to concentrate on the game. Not like he’s got a chance of winning, since Pidge has definitely been cheating all night.

“You’re cheating!” Lance shouts after he fails, yet again, to get the fives he was looking for.

“Am not!” Keith yells back, leaning over the table.

“Shut up,” Pidge hisses, pointing at Shiro, who doesn’t seem to have woken up.

“Yeah, shut up,” Keith mouths at Lance, and throws a card at him. It pegs him right between the eyes; Hunk feels bad for laughing.

Lance tries to throw it back, but the card instead flutters uselessly onto the table.

“I’ll teach you, if you want,” Keith offers, miming his card throw.

The indignation that Hunk knows Lance is about to unleash withers.

“Uh, sure.”

They make it through two more rounds before it becomes obvious that Pidge is unbeatable. Hunk feels finally wound down a little, and he can tell that the others feel the same way. So, at last, time to sleep.

“Should we move Shiro?”

Keith shakes his head. “I’ll handle it.”

Hunk steers Lance out of the room before he can say anything. Halfway down the hallway, though, he stops.

“Hunk?”

“I’m gonna see if Keith needs help with Shiro. He’s kinda,” Hunk gestures in a way that he hopes simultaneously implies that Shiro is extremely buff and Keith is best described as wiry, maybe. Compact. Hunk isn’t sure.

The door to the lounge is cracked open, still, and he can hear voices coming from inside. Hunk stops just outside. He feels bad about eavesdropping, but they had definitely said something about no secrets at some point.

Keith is squatting in front of the couch, talking to Shiro. Hunk catches the word ‘lazy’ and soft laughter in two voices. Then:

“If you want, I can stay.”

“You don’t have to.” Shiro’s voice is distant and soft. This might be the most tired he’s ever sounded.

“It’s fine. Do you wanna hear about the house?”

“Your shack?” Shiro breathes out a chuckle.

“You only say that because you don’t know how much work I did.”

“Tell me,” Shiro says.

Keith settles down on the floor next to Shiro’s head—Hunk can just see the white tuft of Shiro’s hair behind Keith—and starts to talk.

Hunk watches Shiro’s hand hover in the air above Keith, and figures it’s probably time for him to leave.

**ii.**

Down time, Lance has realized, is very rarely actual down time. Which is why he can’t believe that Shiro is asleep right now. They’ve given up and camped out in the hallway near the kitchen, where Pidge and Hunk are trying to throw together something edible before they get to the source of the distress call received earlier.

Lance has been trying to get a betting pool started about what sort of shit they’re about to get into, but nobody’s biting, so instead he’s sitting on the floor staring across at Shiro, who is, for the only second time since Lance has known him, visibly asleep, and at Keith, who’s sitting next to Shiro aimlessly shuffling the cards, totally unbothered by the weirdness at his side.

Shiro’s head tips back against the wall with a dull thunk. Keith flicks a card at Lance.

“Do you want me to teach you?”

Lance is about to reply that there’s nothing in the universe that Keith could possibly teach him when Shiro lets out a snore so loud that it a) completely derails Lance’s train of thought, b) causes Keith to drop the cards with all the grace of an infomercial actor and c) wakes Shiro himself up.

Shiro blinks blearily at them.

“Damn,” Lance says through peals of laughter, “I’ve never heard a person snore that loud.”

“Sorry,” Shiro says.

Lance instantly feels bad.

“No, don’t worry about it. It was just funny.”

“Like a dog farting itself awake,” Keith says, straight-faced.

“What the fuck, man?”

Shiro gives Keith a sleepy side-eye that’s somehow fond at the same time, but says nothing.

Keith shrugs. “I’m just saying.” Then, to Shiro, he lowers his shoulder and Shiro raises his eyebrows, but nods and slumps down far enough to rest his head on Keith’s shoulder.

“That can’t be comfortable,” Lance points out.

“We probably don’t have much time anyway,” Keith tells him, and Shiro huffs out what’s probably meant to be an agreement, but his eyes are already slipping shut again.

Something in Lance’s chest is tight, a little, nothing like what he assumes the vacuum of space to be, but more like allergies. Present, annoying, inconsequential. Keith slides the deck over to him and says, let me see your toss.

Right, the cards, Lance thinks. He flings one at Keith but it falls short.

“It’s in the grip,” Keith tells him, like that’s useful at all. “And the wrist motion.”

“You’re really good at explaining things.”

“Shut up. There’s a reason I never did that teaching assistant stuff at the Garrison.”

“Yeah, ‘cause you dropped out.”

“Before that, asshole. They tried to have me, like, tutor some kid in the simulator. I lasted maybe a week.”

Lance laughs, trying to imagine it. He fiddles with the deck, trying to replicate the movement Keith is making, trying to visualize the arc of the card through the air, flips it up: six of spades, an omen of nothing.

Lance flicks it across the hallway, trying to hit Keith’s nose, and the card zips in a perfect flight—

and pegs Shiro right in the forehead.

Lance and Keith both freeze, eyes wide and mouths open, but Shiro just shifts in his sleep and mumbles something Lance can’t hear.

“Not bad,” Keith tells him, “except for the whole, you know, aiming thing. Unless you were trying to hit Shiro, I mean.”

They dissolve into bickering, flicking cards at each other until Pidge and Hunk come back with something that could maybe pass as an Earth lunch, and Shiro snores gently on until Keith lifts his shoulder and touches Shiro’s ribs with his fingertips, the most gentle touch Lance has ever seen from him.

**iii.**

Drugging their food isn’t a bad idea, Pidge admits later, because the paladins are always excited to eat something that doesn’t look like it came out of the pipes in New Jersey. The bad idea was drugging just Shiro’s. As far as anyone can tell, the aliens had clocked Shiro as the major threat, and figured that if they took him out the rest of them would just fall in line.

Pidge has to laugh just thinking about it.

Of course, they’d still had to drag Shiro’s unconscious body back to the castle. And then fight about who got what shift watching over him—Pidge had pulled third—and then try to figure out what he’d been given and what it would do to him, which Pidge found out she didn’t have the patience for, so she’d left Hunk and Allura and Coran to it.

There’s still probably a quarter of a shift left before she needs to take over from Keith, but there’s nothing else to do and Shiro had looked so bad when they’d brought him back.

Keith is sitting in a chair beside Shiro’s bed, flipping through a book in Altean that Pidge is sure he’s not actually reading. Shiro is still, and pale. She hates it, but Keith’s shoulders stiffen in a way that means that he’s seen her in the doorway, so there’s nothing for it but to come inside.

Keith doesn’t say anything even when she’s stopped right in front of him. Pidge hates this more than anything, except the fact that Shiro is hurt. She hates that Keith acts as though he’s the only one who’s concerned, as though he has some sort of unique claim on fear right now. He meets her eyes at least, and he looks like she feels. Drained. Furious. Afraid.

“I, uh, do you want anything to drink?”

Keith, in a rare moment of tact, doesn’t point out how absurd the situation is. “Sure. Shiro’ll probably want water when he wakes up, too.”

So Pidge goes and she grabs water pouches and snacks, and returns as slowly as possible because she doesn’t want to seem over-eager. She’s rarely conscious of the fact that she’s younger than the other pilots but right now she feels those few years like an anvil tied to her ankle, and she can’t explain why.

She’s dawdling in the hallway when she hears voices coming from Shiro’s room. They’re both talking but Pidge can only understand what Keith is saying: Shiro’s name over and over again. Telling him it’s just me, just Keith, where he is. Pidge can figure out what’s going on. She focuses on her own breathing until the sounds of Shiro’s panic recede. It’s not like they don’t all know about it, sort of, but they never talk about it and Shiro keeps things under wraps and it’s so easy to pretend. Then she walks up and down the hallway until the voices fade away entirely, and then waits a minute more for good measure, not to seem obvious, and then goes back into Shiro’s room.

Keith is streched out beside Shiro, and Shiro’s is sleeping again, curled against Keith’s side. Pidge sets the water down careuflly. Keith doesn’t ask for a cup.

“I think whatever it was is basically out of his system now,” he tells her.

“He does look better.” It’s the truth; Shiro looks better. His color is coming back and he’s no longer sweating.

“I should go tell Allura and the others,” Keith says as he manoeuvers himself off of the bed.

“I can go, if you want.” Pidge blurts. “I mean, it might be better, if Shiro...”

Keith gives her a wry smile. “As long as he’s not alone he should be okay. He trusts you. And if he asks where I am, just tell him.”

“Really,” Pidge insists, “if you want.”

“It’s okay,” Keith tells her. “I need to clear my head, anyway.”

So she lets him go, and settles in to wait, staring at the indent Keith left, and how Shiro still curls into it.

**iv.**

Allura didn’t expect nunvil to have this kind of effect on humans. Alteans drink it slowly, often in dim lighting, and it generally produces a calm state. The paladins have found it more effective to chug; they claim it’s the only way they can handle the taste. The end result is, in retrospect, what one would assume given such a crude method of consumption. 

Lance gets louder. Hunk gets warmer (and a little tearier). Pidge abstains for the most part, but she does sport a maniacal grin for about half an hour. Keith stays quiet but gets somehow softer around the edges. Shiro falls asleep.

Allura, for her part, watches. She loves them, she thinks, but she doesn’t quite understand her paladins. Out of affection, she wants to bridge the gap between them, and as a leader she wants to know if any of them has a fire to match hers. 

Unforunately, this isn’t actually helping much. All she’s learned is that when humans drink nunvil they become exaggerated versions of themselves. Or they finally let themselves breathe. 

Keith surprises her the most; she had expected anger from him, or some sort of noise at least. Maybe she had expected him to fight with Lance, who does sometimes swing by to try and start arguments as he dances around the room. Instead he’s seated an armspan from her, with Shiro’s head pillowed on his lap. Allura doesn’t know what she expected from Shiro. Nothing, she supposes. This is a pleasant surprise.

“He does this every time,” Keith says to her. His hand is in Shiro’s hair.

“He what?” Allura asks, just as Shiro murmurs,

“I do not.”

“You do,” Keith replies. 

“Back at the garrison,” he starts, and that gets the attention of the rest of the paladins, too. “That guy, he was from your class, Shiro, do you remember his name?”

“John?”

“Could’ve been,” Keith agrees. “He snuck a case of whatever that shitty beer they used to sell in town was, and he invited you to come drink it with him. So you brought me, too.”

“He was so pissed,” Shiro says, mostly into Keith’s leg.

“I would be, too,” Lance yells. Or, Allura thinks he’s yelling because he’s loud, but he doesn’t sound angry.

“Anyway,” Keith continues, glaring at Lance, “you had, like, two beers and fell asleep on me immediately.”

“Did not.”

“Did too. You drooled on my uniform.”

That makes even Allura laugh. 

Once it becomes clear that there’s no more gossip to be heard, the rest of the paladins flit away, leaving Allura basically alone with Keith. Keith sets her on edge for no apparent reason, just something in his eyes or the set of his jaw, even though he has been relentlessly on her side. Seeing him this way is unnerving. She focuses on the way Keith’s hand moves through Shiro’s hair, and how for the first time she knows what Shiro looks like without tension running through him.

“You’re close,” she says to Keith.

“Yes,” he answers, not taking her bait.

“Will you tell me about it?”

Keith’s gaze is too calculating for the circumstances, and Allura feels a hot rush of shame, and then anger at being made to feel shame at all.

“There isn’t much to tell,” he says with a shrug.

“I want you to trust me,” Allura tells him. That’s what this is about, at least for her. She trusts the paladins with her life whether she wants to or not. It goes both ways. Or it should.

“I want you to trust me with yourself,” she explains, “and with him.”

That gets Keith’s attention, and he tilts his head, as though thinking it over. Then he stretches his free hand out to Allura and says, “I think I can work on that.”

She reaches out and takes his hand. It’s a start.

**v.**

Coran is an active supporter of shore leave whenever possible, because he is old enough to know the toll that constant fighting takes on a person, and if left to her own devices Allura would keep going until she collapsed. So when they happen to come out of a wormhole near a peaceful, largely uninhabited planet, Coran convinces his princess to give them all a day off.

He’s walking through a purple field towards the village at the far edge, where everyone had gone to sample the local cuisine when he see a strange form lying in the grass ahead of him. As he gets closer Coran realizes it’s not one form, but two familiar ones: Keith and Shiro.

When he gets within speaking range he greets them, and Keith lifts his head with a guilty expression.

“I’d go join the others,” he says, even though Coran has said nothing about that, “but I’m trapped.” He gestures to Shiro, who is draped over him and clearly asleep.

Coran can tell by the pattern of flattened grass around them that this was not always the case, but he says nothing. He, too, was once young and in fields.

“If you’re not at the village by nightfall I’ll come get you,” he tells Keith. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Right.”

Coran goes past them, and eventually he hears laughter behind him, and the rustling of the grass, and so he hurries on.

**(vi.)**

Shiro wakes up warm and heavy, and it takes him a full thirty seconds to realize that this is because Keith is asleep on his chest. The steady rhythm of his breathing lulls Shiro back to sleep even as he tries to tell himself to stay awake, just in case.

When he wakes again it’s because Keith is stirring on top of him. 

“I wasn’t expecting you to still be here,” he says through a yawn.

“I wouldn’t leave you.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Keith says, with a sly smile at the corners of his mouth. “You’re just not one for sleeping in.”

“I never was.”

“I know.”

“But,” Shiro says, twining his arms around Keith’s waist, “I’m always open to opposing arguments.”

Keith laughs then, and Shiro wants to bottle the sound up and carry it around with him. Instead he kisses the corner of Keith’s eye because he’s equally overwhelmed by his sleep-matted eyelashes.

“I think I can make a convincing case,” he says, pressing in close.

“I’m listening,” Shiro murmurs against his mouth.


End file.
